★★★✩✩ (iTMS)

The idea for this app is great. Forgot to bring a deck of cards? Use this app instead. It enforces no rules, instead letting you deal, shuffle and manage stacks like you would if you just had a dumb, physical deck.

Card Deck has an interesting twist to let this app work for local multiplayer up to 4 players. When the phone lies flat on the table, all cards in the player areas are hidden. Every player has an edge each. When the player picks the phone up and tilts it toward them, their and only their cards are revealed, and the other players’ cards can’t be touched. That is, if the feature had worked. I couldn’t get anything to happen when I tilted, so that didn’t really work… You *can* double-tap each card to turn them over for each turn, but I’m sure that’d get tedious fast.

The other major problem is that each player’s hand region is too small. If you want to play a game with hands bigger than six cards, you’re simply screwed; they won’t fit. The game could do with some sort of “hand” concept apart from that holding region, or a much larger playing board that you could pan and zoom.

Finally, I’m having a bit of a hard time envisioning the scenario when you go somewhere you’d want to play cards, but forgot to bring a deck. Sure, it’s possible, especially for a single player game like solitaire. However, the killer feature here would be online multiplayer, where it’d really make sense with an app like this.

I’m keeping my hopes up for this app. This could be really good if given some additional polish. ~~nevyn